South African lenders were told by the nation’s central bank to show watchfulness after Japanese criminals were responsible for stealing vast amounts of funds from ATMs, utilising fake credit cards from the Standard Bank.
The cyber criminals made 14,000 ATM withdrawals over a three-hour period from various 7-Eleven stores in Japan on May 15, withdrawing 1.4bn yen (£8.84m), said one source.
The hackers are still in operation. Mainichi, a newspaper in Japan, reported that sources said that police suspect over 100 people of being involved in the ATM theft which occurred on the 15th of May in Tokyo and over 16 Japanese prefectures.
Kuben Naidoo, deputy governor of the central bank said that Standard Bank will bear the losses.
“We will work with the law enforcement agencies to try and prevent and tackle those crimes.”
The Central bank’s banks registrar, Rene van Wyk, said that lenders replying on external vendors need to show caution as the security attacks were committed internationally, as opposed to domestically.
He said:
“So that vulnerability will always remain because you’re dependent on other parties, so that relationship between vendors and banks, that is one thing that we focus on.”
The fact is that the UK also needs to show vigilance, and this includes SMEs as well as banks. That is hard to achieve, however, when staff are untrained in the area of IT security. That’s why more businesses should offer IT security jobs to those trained in maintaining the security of company data and systems.
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